Seasoned chef brings world
cuisines to Clark Center restaurant

BY BARBARA PALMER

The
freezer is almost empty at LINX, the newly opened Clark Center
restaurant. That's because executive chef Gary Arthur insists on
using fresh ingredients for nearly everything: Those are fresh
tomatoes in the tomato-and-potato stew and freshly roasted ginger
root in the orange-ginger dressing, meant to be drizzled over
grilled salmon. For the Vietnamese pho soup, Arthur
charbroils ginger and onion to add to cinnamon-spiced beef stock
that's ladled over meatballs, more fresh vegetables and rice
noodles that are made daily in San Francisco. Creamy corn risotto
is stirred up a few minutes before the lunch crowd
arrives.

And
in less than a month, there already is a crowd. The kitchen
regularly serves about 600 lunches a day, including "an incredible
repeat business," said Arthur, who formerly presided over the
kitchens of luxury hotels including the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago and
the Fairmont in San Francisco. One diner shows up every day at 11
a.m. and orders eight take-out meals for himself and his
colleagues. (The restaurant is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and
serves lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.)

LINX executive chef Gary
Arthur, who’s presided over the kitchens of several luxury
hotels, prepares a day's supply of roti to go with a curry being
served during lunch. “Campus life offers me a place to
belong,” he said. Photo: L.A.
Cicero

But
at LINX, the quality of the food is only part of the story. The
prices are low enough for the average graduate student budget. The
pho is $4.25, and even though the rotating menu sometimes
includes such items as Hawaiian tombo tuna, the highest-priced item
is $6.95.

"We're not talking $30 a plate," says Arthur, as he spoons
cranberry and papaya chutney over roast turkey and dishes up a
golden mound of roasted pumpkin and butternut squash. "But it's
still an artsy plate of food."

LINX, set in the middle of the Clark Center laboratories, is
itself a kind of experiment in the role social interaction plays in
scientific collaboration. During the early stage of planning for
Bio-X, the idea to devote a chunk of building space to a restaurant
was sparked at a visit to Cambridge University. There, executive
planning committee members noted the fruitful conversations between
scientists who gathered in a science building every afternoon for
tea, said Channing Robertson, a chemical engineering professor and
committee member. "We expanded that concept and took it up another
level -- that of having a full-service restaurant to serve as a
social magnet to enable the serendipity that often is associated
with discovery," he said.

There was resistance to devoting so much square-footage that
otherwise could have been used for lab space to a dining facility,
Robertson said. "I am pleased it survived, because anyone who goes
there now can see the value it brings."

At
LINX, diners sit at long, lab-coat white tables -- ideal for
breaking down social barriers between people, said Beth Kane,
director of operations at Bio-X. In restaurants furnished with many
smaller tables, people tend to sit alone and are isolated from each
other, she said. "At a long table, diners are more likely to strike
up a conversation."

With its phosphorescence-green walls and the long glass wall
opening up in the courtyard, the restaurant is nearly impossible to
miss. "That was extremely intentional," Kane said. "We wanted every
facet of this building and this program to be welcoming and to
expose people to new ways of thinking, eating and
doing."

The
restaurant is divided into three cooking platforms: "Main Street,"
featuring American regional cuisine; "Mosaic," featuring
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine; and "Pao!" featuring
Asian cuisine. "We wanted customers to experience something new,
delicious and stimulating to whet their palate and excite their
senses," said Shirley Everett, associate vice provost and director
for Residential and Dining Enterprises, who oversaw the development
of the restaurant's concept.

When LINX opened, Arthur was ready with an eight-week cycle of
menus, but he has had to rethink his original plan of changing
menus weekly, since customers already have become attached to
certain dishes. In the future, the restaurant probably will have
some staples that don't change and other rotating dishes, he
said.

The
chef's ease with multiple cuisines comes naturally to Arthur, who
spent his early years in Trinidad and Tobago, where exposure to
international foods was part of daily life. Arthur was living in
the Bronx, however, when he entered the world of cooking. "I was 14
years old and sitting in the principal's office being reprimanded
for some infraction," Arthur recalls. "I stole a work permit from
his desk."

Arthur got a job as a dishwasher at the United Nations and,
after three days, was invited into a chef's apprentice program. The
U.N. apprenticeship launched Arthur's career: He has worked as an
executive chef in kitchens in the United States, Canada and Hong
Kong, including St. Barth's Market and Grill in Los Angeles (Arthur
was working there in 1988 when Esquire magazine named the
restaurant one of the top 10 new restaurants in the country).
Recently, Arthur was chef de cuisine for the luxe Mandarin
Oriental Hotel Group in Hong Kong.

Giving up plush hotels for LINX, where linen tablecloths have
been replaced with a chrome rack where diners return their trays,
was a wonderful decision, Arthur said.

"Campus life offers me a place to belong. I like seeing the
same faces every day," he said. At Stanford, "I feel like we all
treat each other as equals. I love serving the human need for food
and I love the fact that at the university, people don't make me
feel like I'm a servant." (The egalitarian ethic extends to his
staff: Everybody gets a chance to cook, including the
dishwashers.)

It's exciting, too, to work among so many people who are as
passionate about their work as he is about food, he said. The
faculty and students in the surrounding labs "all have projects
they are nurturing and caring about. This is my little project. I
want to see how up there can I get with what I've got to work
with."